This afternoon I met with Farhad Manjoo, the author of True Enough: Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society (2008). Manjoo is the technology columnist for Slate, after several years at Salon.
When I blogged about this book previously, strictly based upon the title I had a different impression of what it would be about. I definitely enjoyed reading it, despite these mis-perceptions. So first, let's discuss what I thought it would be about. After that, we'll turn to what it actually covers!
For me, the phrase "true enough" brought to mind the fungibility of truth--how so many things can never be certain in a world of competing values. Indeed, much of daily life is about reconciling multiple points of view. Online, Wikipedia's existence derives from a bedrock belief that the welter of different viewpoints and expertise will produce encyclopedia entries that are just as rigorous as anything that would appear in the Britannica. Aggregating the inevitably incomplete understanding of any one person (a "true enough" understanding, you might say) into a collective whole will yield "truth," hopefully. Or at least this is the Wikipedian creed, which I subscribe to for the most part--this is the "wisdom of crowds," etc.
So I was surprised that Manjoo didn't cover Wikipedia in the book. In conversation he said he had assumed Wikipedia would come up, but that the book didn't evolve that way. Indeed, he loves Wikipedia and uses it all the time. I mentioned that librarian thinking on Wikipedia has fruitfully evolved--from futile attempts to steer people away from it to making smart suggestions about how to use it better.
Manjoo is frustrated by the lack of full text access to many of the medical journal articles referenced in Wikipedia. I said librarians were generally supportive of open access publishing (in 2003 Manjoo wrote about the open access movement at the Public Library of Science and the ill-fated Sabo Bill for Salon), and then we briefly discussed the present-day NIH Public Access Policy.
Since it's not about Wikipedia, what is the book about? Manjoo skillfully reports on how the Web has made it much easier to distribute totally unjustified notions. Some examples he cites: that HIV doesn't cause AIDS; that the elections in Ohio in 2004 were fradulent; that John Kerry acted dishonorably on those Swift Boats in Vietnam. The latter two examples are hobbyhorses of the activist left and activist right--Manjoo evenhandedly critiques the sacred cows of all sides, which I admire.
How can people get away with peddling such palpably untrue things, especially when it is so easy to fact-check them online? Here Manjoo dives deep into the psychological literature to discuss concepts like selective exposure and peripheral processing. Humans selectively choose what to focus on, and we generally decide to pay attention to what we already agree with. And since there is no way to be an expert in most topics, we must rely instead on cues of expertise ("peripheral" cues) t0 help us decide what to think about an issue.
Peripheral cues can bathe an obviously false idea with the patina of expertise; one of the people behind the Swift Boat smear was Jerome Corsi, Ph.D. Although a Ph.D. seems to lend legitimacy to anything, in this case it was just part of the obfuscation behind a lie. Over the summer of 2004 the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth quietly amassed supporters among the hard right, using new online capabilities to rally people together. By August 2004 this campaign crossed the threshold of broader national consciousness, and the establishment media skillfully debunked the charges against John Kerry. (Meanwhile, Kerry took too long to respond.) But by then the damage was done--the Swift Boat allegations weren't true, but for many people they were true enough.
So it's snarly out there online; we all should avoid as best we can the double-trap of selective exposure and over-reliance on peripheral cues of expertise. That said, I was struck by how most of Manjoo's examples are from many years before the Web was born. For example, he discusses a famous football game between Dartmouth and Princeton during the 1950s, in which both sides thought the other side had played dirty (selective exposure). And he documents the mysterious case of "Dr. Fox," an ostensible lecturer in the 1970s who would say nothing of consequence but nonetheless convince educated people that he was brilliant (peripheral processing).
I learned a lot about psychology, but since the examples are old I wasn't sure whether Manjoo was saying anything new. His point, though, is that the Web provides a much greater capacity than ever before to act upon these troubling aspects of human nature. The Swift Boat campaign would probably have gone nowhere in the 1970s, because the TV networks and leading newspapers wouldn't have validated it. But by 2004, there was a viable way to circumvent the "mainstream media" and build a very effective movement.
I challenged Manjoo about his subtitle: do we really live in a "post-fact" society because of the Web? Not really; in many cases facts are facts. But we're "post-fact" in the sense that people with an online agenda have less allegiance to facts than ever before.
OK--I can buy that, even though this is quite disturbing. But I'm still troubled by the phrase "true enough," because in many cases we must rely on partially true information in order to move forward. There's a lot we don't know, and many shades of gray between what's black and white. We all live in the world of true enough sometimes, and this is OK.
Manjoo is concerned with empirical facts, not more mushy truths. So in my layman's opinion, the phrase "True or Not" more accurately captures the thrust of this important and engaging book.
P.S. If you want more, check out Manjoo's friendly debate with Steve Johnson on Slate, or his refined discussion over at the Inkwell.
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